The Orange Dragon

I have one more teensy project left to round out bathroom renovation month at Apartment Therapy. Here's one for the kiddies...

This is another idea I've had for year. The source of inspiration for this project is the cover of a children's book I had as a wee lad, and I've wanted to reproduce it since infancy. To create this room, it needed a less illustrational background, and my mind drifted back to some photos I took in Paris of these 18th century painted panels. So what we have in the final composite image is a Rococo vision of a bucolic Medieval landscape with a 1960s children's book illustration, all zippered together.

Colorwise, the basecoat is Weston Flax, a historic color from Benjamin Moore. I don't like yellow much unless I love it, but we wanted something simple — not white and not beige, and definitely not Crayola. I find that the first six colors in the Historic collection (HC-1 through-6) are good go-to yellows for just such a project: time-tested and slightly complex.

The big challenge for me was the tree color, which I've written about elsewhere, and which was anything but green — mostly Payne's Gray, Red Siena and Olive Oxide Brown. Also, it took many thin layers of paint to flesh out the dragon and lift it out of its illustrational origins. I don't claim to make anything new, as much as to take sources of inspiration and update them, change the scale and lend them my own hand.